[2516] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: -ghach
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Wed Jan 12 11:07:50 1994
Reply-To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@klingon.East.Sun.COM>
From: Will Martin <whm2m@uva.pcmail.virginia.edu>
To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@klingon.East.Sun.COM>
Date: Wed, 12 Jan 94 11:00:59 EST
On Jan 11, 8:30pm, DSTRADER@delphi.com wrote:
...
> If you don't mind, I should now like to come to grips with reality.
> THERE IS NO SENTENCES-AS-SUBJECTS CONSTRUCTION IN KLINGON!!!!!!!!!!
> yet.
...
> this is Guido#1, Leader of All Guidos, signing off---*
I recently worked on this in an off-the-list discussion and suspect I
may have figured out WHY there is no such construction. I think it is related
to the way that noun conjunctions FOLLOW the pair (or list) of nouns while
sentence conjunctions come BETWEEN the sentences.
Noun conjunctions follow the nouns because it is weird to do so. It may
not be unique to do so. I'm sure there are many languages that do it, but it
is more rare than placing conjunctions between the nouns, and in particular,
it is more foreign to English. So why didn't Okrand do that with sentence
conjunctions as well?
Nouns rarely have positionally significant accompanying words that could
be confusing among nouns joined by conjunctions. It can either have following
nouns (noun-noun construction TKD 3.4) or adjectives (TKD 4.4). We can
construct ambiguous examples, but most of the time, it is not confusing. It
is an acceptable level of ambiguity.
Verbs, on the other hand, quite often have subjects and objects that are
positionally defined, and if verbal conjunctions followed the pair (or list)
of verbs, it would be quite common to see a sentence in the form:
{verb noun verb conjunction}
Great. So is the noun the subject of the first verb or the object of the
second verb? There's no way to know. If the conjunction came between the
verbs, it would disambiguate to which verb the noun applied. The conjunction
becomes the boundary between the two sentences.
If we take this insight into the use of {'e'} to represent a previous
sentence, we see that it can only work if we use it as an OBJECT of the
second sentence. Like a conjunction, it joins two sentences. If it were
SUBJECT of the second sentence, it would FOLLOW the second verb and we'd
have:
{verb noun verb 'e'}
Again, is the noun the subject of the first verb or the object of the
second verb? There's no way to tell. You don't have that problem if {'e'} is
used only as object of the second verb:
{verb noun 'e' verb}
The noun is always subject of the first verb. It can't be object of the
second verb because {'e'} is always the object of the second verb. This makes
{'e'}, like a verbal conjunction, the boundary between the two sentences. I
suspect that Okrand decided that, given the nature of the constructions he
had created up to this point, the language lost less by not having a
sentence-as-subject construction than by allowing 'e' to be used as subject.
He may have decided that -ghach would cover the needs of
sentence-as-subject, but he did one piss poor job of describing it if that
was his intent. This construction also becomes massively confusing if the
{-ghach}ed verb has explicit subjects and objects, since these nouns
preceeding and following the verbs could instead be part of some noun-noun
construction indicating possession, since the verb is also a noun:
{noun1 verb1 noun2 verb2ghach noun4}
Note that verb2ghach also serves as noun3. This means that noun2 and
noun4 may be object and subject of verb2, which is the subject of verb1. It
also could mean that the subject of verb1 may be a noun owned by noun2,
comprising of the sentence that uses noun4 as subject and verb2 as verb. It
could also mean that the subject of verb1 could be noun4, which is owned by
the noun which is a sentence formed from the nominal form of verb2 with noun2
as its object. It also could be that noun2 owns noun3 (verb2ghach), which
owns noun4.
In short, it easily becomes a useless mess.
As for Krankor's use of -ghach for gerund (especially in comparatives),
while I agree it is not pretty and I agree that I will search HARD for
alternatives in EVERY instance I am tempted to use it this way, I have to
stop short of rejecting it. After all, it works, it does not obviously
violate any rules, it is relatively unambiguous assuming we AVOID using
explicit subjects and objects, and it came from someone I respect.
As for using -ghach on bare verb stems, I have to say that upon
repetitive rereading of TKD 4.2.9, page 176, I cannot ever justify the
practice. There is nothing in the description of the use of -ghach that says
it is okay to use it on bare verbs. It looks very much like -ghach was added
in order to nominalize verbs with verbal suffixes. It does NOT look like
-ghach was invented to make nouns out of bare verbs that do not clearly have
noun forms (which is how it is most commonly used). It does NOT appear that
it was invented in order to add to verbs that DO have noun forms in order to
establish that we are indeed using the noun and not the verb, as Guido
suggests.
All of this is just opinion. I am not seeking to set Guido straight, or
to set anyone ELSE straight. I have no authority to do so. I speak my opinion
so that this group can compare my opinion to the opinion of others so we can
polish something approaching a consensus on grammatical issues that are as
yet vague. I am willing to shift my opinion if an arguement appears to carry
sufficient authority and logical soundness behind it, based upon TKD and
other Okrandian sources.
-- charghwI'
